Yesterday, Alfresco announced the agendas for the upcoming Alfresco Summits. This included our keynote speakers who include, Andrew McAfee, Stephen O’Grady, and Jimmy Wales. I’ve met and reviewed books here on the Word from both Andrew and Stephen. If you don’t know who Jimmy is, go look him up on his website, Wikipedia.

Of course, more importantly, I am going to be speaking at both the Barcelona and Boston editions of Summit. I’m actually very intrigued by the back-to-back nature of the Alfresco Summits. I am used to vendors having conferences in different geographies. Having them back-to-back is an interesting concept. Speaking at both, it means some concentrated traveling on my part, but I won’t be alone.

The New Summit

If you do your research, you will realize that there hasn’t been an Alfresco “Summit” before. The reason is that before this year, Summit was known as DevCon. We are expanding the conference to include end-users and turning it into an user conference.

There are two business tracks that are new and I am looking forward to participating in those tracks. While I am getting out to meet users on a regular basis, this is a great opportunity to meet a broader collection of who are using the system. Like any conference, I expect to hear good and bad. As long as it is the truth, I’ll be happy.

My Role

I was a last minute addition to the agenda, having joined Alfresco only two weeks ago. I am leading a customer/partner panel focused Running a Successful Content Management Project in both Boston and Barcelona. I’ve run a few of these but I want to learn more from the panelist as much as you likely want to learn.

The goal is to start a conversation between the panelists and the audience that after our scheduled time. We aren’t going to discuss what platform you need to use for Alfresco. The focus is going to be on the Project Planning and Change Management that needs to be done even before the project starts. We’ll then tackle standard roadblocks, how to get past them, and how to transition from the old system to the new, aka Migration Strategies.

The panelists are smart people, many of whom I’ve met, and I look forward to sharing the stage with them.

The Obvious Plea

If you are a business owner, process owner, user, or just generally want to know what the fuss is, come on out to the conference. The more people that attend, the better the event.

Oh, and it promises to be fun as well.